Google has announced that it has made its largest purchase of renewable energy ever, as it progresses towards its commitment to powering its business operations with clean energy by 100 percent. It marks as the most diverse and biggest purchase made by a non-utility company, and it goes to show the search engine giant's seriousness in renewable energy.
The deal will provide an additional 842 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to power up Google's own data centers. Google says that it's nearly doubling the amount of renewable energy it has purchased up to this date in three countries. The company now has up to 2 gigawatts, which equates to taking nearly one million cars off the road.
Most of the renewable energy has been purchased for its locations in the United States, but according to Google, it has added more than 150 megawatts from a wind farm in Sweden to a solar plant in Chile.
Google's commitment to renewable energy also greatly contributes to giant energy companies such as EDF, Duke and RES (Renewable Energy Systems) Americas as it helps the finances to continue building further facilities.
According to Google, the long-term contracts range from 10 to 20 years and deliver projects with the financial assurance and scale that are required to build the wind and solar facilities to bring new renewable energy onto the grid. For Google's part, the deals that it has made do not only help minimize the environmental impact of its services but they also make sense, in a business standpoint, by ensuring that the prices are good.
Aside from Google, Apple and Microsoft are also big on their push for green energy. Recently, Cupertino has invested in solar farms as of late, and Redmond has purchased wind energy. Amazon is also committed to running its cloud-based AWS, a web service that runs entirely on renewable energy.
